So many Indians apply to study at London Metropolitan that a few years ago the university opened recruitment offices in Delhi and Chennai.

But on Thursday both branches had been shut down. In the Delhi towerblock where the university had an outpost as recently as 31 July, a financial consulting firm had stuck a print-out of its own logo over the Met's and the university's letterbox in the basement was overflowing.

Across the hallway from the old offices on the seventh floor of the Ashoka Estate, Puneet Soin said he was shocked to hear about the UK Border Agency (UKBA) decision. "If they can take away London Met's licence, they can take away any other university's licence," said Soin, who manages the Indian office of Study In UK (SIUK), a commercial firm which helps students win places at UK universities and colleges. His staff had been fielding calls from anxious Indian students worried they could be deported from Britain, or not get beyond passport control at Heathrow.

SIUK has 10 wannabe students who were hoping to enrol at London Met in the next few weeks, paying annual fees of £10,000 or more for the privilege; they are now hurriedly trying to find places at other universities in the UK capital. It's proving surprisingly easy.

"Literally five minutes before you arrived I had an email from a rival London university offering to fast track the application of anyone who had been planning to come to London Met," said Soin at teatime on Thursday. He wasn't prepared to name the sender.

Soin, himself an engineering graduate of Warwick University, regularly used to dispatch students across the hall to talk to recruiters from London Met, and said he had a number of meetings with Mark Bickerton, director of the university's international office.

"Before this UKBA stuff, Mark told me that they were closing down the India offices to save money. He said they wanted to spend it on scholarships for Indian students," said Soin.

He claimed Bickerton wrote him an email just last week saying he was confident the university would win back its licence to teach and recruit international students, and that SIUK should simply encourage applicants to defer until the February 2013 intake.

Soin said it was well known that many Indians applying to UK universities had no intention of studying. "We divide the market into two categories: the university market for genuine students and the immigration market," he said, stressing that his company only worked with the former. "It's easy to tell someone who just wants to get the visa," he said. "They are the ones who turn up and say: 'Get me into a UK university, here's my budget,' without specifying which university or which course they fancy."